Missouri Blue Book Online
The Official Manual of the State of Missouri, a.k.a. Blue Book, is posted
online at
http://www.sos.state.mo.us/bluebook/. The 2001-2002 edition provides
Missourians information about all levels of government, from local to
federal. It also features the winners of a photo contest depicting
Missouri's patriotism.

The front page is the table of contents, click on any chapter to get a
rundown of its contents. Each chapter is downloadable as a Adobe PDF file.

The last link in the Blue Book's table of contents is to a search engine.
My query for voter registration listed search results by relevancy, with
an abstract and a link to the full document as well as a link to the
summary. Another search option is of state personnel. Search results list
the person's department, title and salary. This site is worth a look and
while you are there
check the winning photograph.

Freedom Info
Freedominfo.org (http://www.freedominfo.org/)
is a portal for freedom of information advocates. Its focuses are best
practices, lessons learned and campaign strategies for those defending
global information freedom. It also looks at drafting and implementing
laws protecting citizen's rights to governmental information.

The front page links to case studies and a global survey. News articles
link to related articles on the same subject. The current analysis
compares the 2001 Information Disclosure Law in the Japan with the Freedom
of Information Act in the U.S.

New services for citizens include Income Tax Return Filing and the Utah
Community Services Directory. The Services Directory can be searched by
keyword or narrowed by county and type of people needing the service.
Services can also be searched by organization name or needed service. The
Services Directory also opens a page to anyone in search of a volunteer
opportunity.

Online services on the Business Side include a UCC Lookup from the state's
Department of Commerce. This service allows searching of the Uniform
Commercial Core or the Central Filing Search System by number or debtor
name. Another new online service is the renewal system for occupational
and professional licenses. It's a straight forward four-step process.

Who's Who Coming to Cyberspace
Competitive Analysis Technologies (CAT) has released its tenth quarterly
update of "Power Utilities on the Internet" with 3,500 natural gas and
electric resource profiles. The revised edition is available via the
Internet, as a stand-
alone CD-ROM or as a hard copy. Online demonstrations are available from
www.catsites.com/demo.
Additional industry-specific databases available from CAT include "Oil and
Gas on the Internet" in both Upstream and Downstream versions. Get more
information from the press release at
http://library.northernlight.com/FC20020731730000023.html.

Washington Post to Require Some
Registration Info
Editor and Publisher is reporting (http://tinyurl.com/ytp)
that The Washington Post will begin requiring demographic information to
read stories on the site. Currently WashingtonPost.com is only asking for
readers to voluntarily provide that information, but starting August 14
supplying the information will be mandatory.

If you visit
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/metro/ you'll see that
WashingtonPost.com is making the information request at the top of their
page. Click on the "Tell Me More" link at the top of the page and you'll
get a popup box requesting your gender, year of birth, zip code (for US
residents only) and zip code.

There is no way to register with a username on this box, so I'm assuming
that WashingtonPost.com is tracking this information with cookies, or else
we have to enter information every time we visit the site (yuck.) Of
course, many people like me either reject cookies or dump them at the end
of every browser session. Frankly I'd rather be able to register.

Or even pay! $2 a month or something for access to 30 days' worth of the
Washington Post. Surely the WP would make more from a $2/month
subscription fee than they would from my eyeballs looking at ads?